Had two black screens happen while attempting to respond to this post. Before, there has never been information in the syslog as to why the screen went black. This time, I was able to find a bluescreen message with the following information
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x00000117 (0xfffffa8018c11010, 0xfffff88004217f80, 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000). A dump was saved in: C:\Windows\Minidump\061214-29702-01.dmp. Report Id: 061214-29702-01.
The computer had just booted up, and besides running firefox and thunderbird, no other activities were taking place.
From the windows report of that bugcheck from
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff557271%28v=vs.85%29.aspx it states...
The bugcheck was: 0x00000117
Based on that error code, it states "This indicates that the display driver failed to respond in a timely fashion."
This graphics card is about 4 days old from a purchase on Amazon. I am assuming that the graphics card is potentially bad?